Before the rise of paper photography in the 1850s, artists relied on illustrated publications to reproduce unique daguerreotype views. The most ambitious of these publications, Noël-Paymal Lerebours’s Excursions daguerriennes, first appeared in 1840. Lerebours commissioned and acquired daguerreotypes from around the globe. The Swiss-born entrepreneur Joly contributed the first photograph of the Parthenon, made in October 1839, noting that "each year can bring new changes to the appearance of the celebrated ruins." (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/269123)

Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours (16 February 1807 – 23 July 1873) was a French optician and daguerreotypist. He is best known today for his Excursions Daguerriennes, books of views of the world's monuments, based on early photographs redrawn by hand as Aquatint engravings.  Lerebours is known for his Excursions Daguerriennes, books of views of the world's monuments, based on early photographs, produced in Paris in a number of subscription volumes between 1841 at the dawn of photography and 1864.[7][8][9] Some of the photographs, of the Niagara Falls as well as of Rome and Paris, were taken by the English industrial chemist Hugh Lee Pattinson. These were then transferred to engravings to illustrate Lerebours' Excursions Daguerriennes (Paris, 1841–1864).[10] However, the manual process of translating the photographs to aquatint engravings took away the immediacy of the real daguerreotypes, whatever the gains in quality. In 1851, Lerebours was one of the founders of the first photographic society, the Société Héliographique. Die Fotografen sind in den Bildunterschriften nicht erwähnt. Nur wenige Namen konnten erschlossen werden (Pierre-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière, Fréderic Goupil-Fesquet und Hugh Lee Pattinson). Links steht meist „Daguerreotype Lerebours“ als Verweis auf den Rechteinhaber, in der Mitte der Drucker, rechts der bearbeitende Kupferstecher. Die epochemachende Stellung dieser Publikation beruht darauf, dass hier zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte auf der Basis fotografischer Aufnahmen topographische Ansichten in nennenswertem Umfang vervielfältigt und publiziert wurden. Doch ist die Neuheit nicht nur technischer Art. Sie markiert auch einen Wendepunkt in Stil und Wirklichkeitswahrnehmung. Zwar erreicht die Wiedergabe mittels der Aquatintatechnik nicht die hohe Detailauflösung der originalen Daguerreotypie, aber die harte Gradation, der objektiv vorhandene Kontrast zwischen Hell- und Dunkelwerten ist eine Eigenschaft, die durch die Fotografie in die Bilderwelt kam. Die subjektive visuelle Wahrnehmung des Menschen ist dagegen in der Lage, Helligkeitsstufen auszugleichen und entsprechend reduziert waren die Schlagschatten der älteren Ansichtengraphik. Kulturgeschichtlich gesprochen war die herkömmliche Darstellungsweise idealisiert, sie hatte etwas Zeitloses, zumindest zeitlich Undefiniertes. Ganz anders die Fotografie und ihr von Lerebours publizierter, hybrider Abkömmling: Anhand des Schattenfalls sind Tages- und Jahreszeit zu bestimmen.[10] Zudem erlaubt die Perspektive, den Standort des Fotografen und des Betrachters eindeutig zu lokalisieren. Der Gestaltungsspielraum des Kupferstechers wurde äußerst reduziert. In der Produktion und Rezeption von Bildern wie auch in anderen Kunstäußerungen gewinnt eine objektive, realistische Sicht an Bedeutung. Das von Lerebours edierte Album steht damit auch am Anfang einer langen, von Künstlern und Wissenschaftlern geführten Auseinandersetzung zwischen Fotografie und graphischer Kunst.(wikipedia) Coming to Egypt two years after Vernet and Goupil-Fesquet, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey spent several years making more than 800 daguerreotypes of monuments throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Aiming to be the first to collect and publish images of the world’s great monuments, the wealthy Parisian optician Noël-Marie Paymal Lerebours equipped a handful of amateurs with cameras and chemicals.

In addition, he offered a commission to the Orientalist painter Horace Vernet, director the French Academy in Rome, and his nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet—the latter to make photographs to complement his uncle’s sketches. The two traveled to Marseille and departed for Egypt on October 21, 1839. They stopped in Italy, Malta and Greece before landing in Alexandria on November 4. Goupil-Fesquet wrote in 1844 in Voyage d’Horace Vernet en Orient. He questioned his guests on the state of the arts and sciences in Europe and expressed an interest in seeing how the new photographic instrument worked. Vernet and Goupil-Fesquet returned to Ras el-Tin palace on the edge of Alexandria’s harbor the next day at seven a.m. to demonstrate the daguerreotype.

The operation lasted some minutes, and Mohammed Ali was wary. After being exposed, the sensitized, polished mirror was fumed with mercury in a wooden box. The fixed image was then bathed in a solution of hyposulphite of soda and rinsed in distilled water. Although it was a mechanical process that applied science to the arts, it had a whiff of magic about it.

That image from November 7, 1839, is the first documented photograph of Egypt, and indeed of the African continent. The original plate is long gone, but an engraving from it (see top-most banner image) shows an ornate outer gate with two men, perhaps a guard and a doorman, lounging in the open doorway. Behind, with tall windows and low-peaked roofs, stands the palace harem. A couple of trees lean over the fence.

Also following in the footsteps of Vernet and Goupil-Fesquet was Alphonse-Eugène-Jules Itier, another daguerreotypist who traveled to document world treasures in the early 1840s. While he was working for the French Customs Service, his travels took him to Africa, the West Indies, China, the Pacific Islands, Borneo, Manila—and Egypt, where in 1845 or 1846 he exposed this unusually candid image of travelers on the Nile in a sailing boat. - Daguerreotypists raced to capture the world’s wonders with their new medium. Egypt was among their first and most desired destinations—along with Greece and Rome—but Arago’s lofty goal of photographing all of the country’s hieroglyphics remained a scholar’s wish amid newly fervent commercial competition.

Egypt, it turned out, was an excellent place to work as a daguerreotypist, especially in the cool of winter. It offered photographers good and ample light, which was important for the long exposures daguerreotypes required. Most importantly, it had an abundance of historical places of the highest public interest to capture. Other photographers were not long in arriving. That November, Vernet and Goupil-Fesquet met another daguerreotypist in Alexandria, Pierre Joly de Lotbinière. Born in Switzerland, raised in France and, at age 41, a wealthy landowner living outside Quebec, Canada, he was in Paris at the time of Daguerre’s announcement. He was about to embark on a tour of the eastern Mediterranean, and he was fascinated by the new photographic process. Caught up in “daugerreotypomania,” he, too, had secured a commission (as well as equipment) from Lerebours. En route to Egypt, Joly de Lotbinière had stopped in Athens, where in mid-October he had made the first photographs of the Acropolis.

Soon after meeting, the three daguerreotypists made their way south to the splendors of Cairo. “We have been daguerreotyping like lions,” Vernet wrote to a friend. The trio arrived in neighboring Giza to photograph the Sphinx on the same November day. There were just two cameras in all of Egypt, and the photographer behind each was jockeying for the best angle of the same famously enigmatic antiquity.( https://www.aramcoworld.com/articles/2015/capturing-the-light-of-the-nile-egypts-first-photographs)

On November 20, Goupil-Fesquet captured another iconic monument, the Pyramid of Cheops, working from outside a gate that surrounded the complex. The scene, which is known today only through a subsequent engraving (see top banner image), is bucolic, with a saddled camel and three people quietly lounging in the foreground, the pyramid rising behind it in brilliant light. The exposure took 15 minutes.